THEBIGISSUE21FEB–6MAR2014 31
perspective of one character to another. So we empathise
with Dorothea because she’s married to an older man who
doesn’t understand her. But then Eliot shifts to see the
marriage from Casaubon’s perspective. And it turns out he
feels that she’s judging him and exposing him as a failure.
We know these things happen in our own lives all the time.
It’s a good reminder for readers to have.”
For those starting their own road to Middlemarch,
Mead offers this advice: “It’s important not to think of it
just as a ‘classic’ and therefore intimidating and not fun.
[Middlemarch] is actually very funny, and devastatingly acute
in the way it describes the psychologies of its characters.”
This is not to say it’s stuffy or “self-helpy”, Mead is
careful to point out. “[Middlemarch] is actually quite
bleak and devastating in its emotional conclusions, but the
voice of the book is so intelligent. It’s the kind of book you
read and feel yourself to be in the presence of someone
very wonderful.”
For Mead, researching this book was the closest way she
could get to her idol. From visiting Eliot’s old homesteads
to poring over her diaries and letters to interviewing her
surviving ancestors, The Road to Middlemarch offers a
fascinating insight into the private life of George Eliot. “It
sounds funny”, Mead says, “but I feel like I did meet her”.
Mead, like Eliot, is a very astute writer and The Road
to Middlemarch brims with memorable passages worthy of
underlining and dog-earing by the reader. Through focusing
on Eliot’s classic novel, Mead hopes to show the way a book
can “insert itself into...a reader’s own life story, until it’s hard
to know what one would be without it.”
Of course, we all have our own Middlemarch. There’s the
book with the ending we read over and over and still find
ourselves moved to tears; the characters we have to keep
reminding ourselves are actually fictional, even though their
words speak so closely to our lived experience.
This is why you don’t need to have read Middlemarch
to be moved by Mead’s book, and one of her great hopes is
to encourage a new wave of Eliot readers. “To me it seems
completely normal that you might read [Middlemarch] every
five years,” Mead laughs, before adding in all seriousness,
“I don’t know why everybody doesn’t read it every five years.”
by Emily Laidlaw
» The Road to Middlemarch is out now.
DOROTHEA BROOKE AND WILL LADISLAW FROM MIDDLEMARCH BY
GEORGE ELIOT. ILLUSTRATION PUBLISHED BY THE JENSON SOCIETY,
NEW YORK, 1910 — SOURCE WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
THEBIGISSUE21FEB–6MAR2014 31